Last year I wrote about how to get a cultural grant for game design in Finland. Apparently I knew my stuff then, as yesterday The Finnish Cultural Foundation awarded me a 9000 € grant in the category of “children’s culture” for finishing, writing and illustrating my game Eleanor’s Dream. I applied as a team with my brother Jari, who’s going to illustrate the book. As far as I know, there haven’t been too many grants like this yet, so I’m pretty excited about it, and will be trying to make a good impression on the cultural elites of the country. Read the rest of this entry »

So I finished The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time yesterday. The game was originally for Nintendo 64 and was published almost ten years ago; at the time I was involved with other things, but I finally now got around to playing it on Gamecube, another deprecated game console. Nothing to make you feel old like taking up a game you consider “new” and realizing that it was published ten years ago. Here follow some thoughts on the good and bad parts of Ocarina of Time, in review style; I understand that this is a rather popular and influential game, for which I’m glad, as it’s far from the worst that electronic gaming has to offer. Read the rest of this entry »

This one’s a pretty interesting sequence of events. As the reader might know, I run this little indie roleplaying game web store with my brothers at the Arkenstone website, alongside selling our own publications. This is mostly a hobby thing in that it just about pays for itself and allows me to stock my own game library relatively cheaply. A part of the process in selling a lot of indie games is trying to find out about new ones; indie designers are often rotten marketers in that they don’t usually make much noise about their games, not even in places where one might imagine interested people to listen. Often enough finding new and interesting games is about actively following forums and listening to other people who like the same kind of games. Read the rest of this entry »

If you can call a month’s break a hiatus, anyway. I’ve been plenty busy with all seven kinds of projects ranging from typical whitecollar slaving to preparing for Tracon, one of my favourite Finnish conventions. Apparently blogging is one of the simpler things to set aside when you’re busy, so here we are.

It should make sense that after not writing the blog for a month I should have some interesting topics. At least they interest myself:

I read the entire oeuvre of Vaskikirjat, a Finnish indie fantasy publisher. Pretty interesting, I’ll be writing about it a bit later. Erkka Leppänen, the publisher, has good taste.

I’ve been playing a lot of Fantasy Flight Games boardgames, which basically means large Ameritrash games with lots of pieces. Something useful should be said about those, I think.

I’m almost done with Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which is apparently considered one of the best adventure video game titles of its generation at the end of the ’90s. I was mired in low quality computer gaming at the time, which perhaps explains why I’m just playing the game with determination now. Some interesting notes presumably forthcoming.

As the readers of this blog know, I’ve been working with “adventure gaming” lately, which then became the topic of a lecture I gave at the aforementioned Tracon convention. Some folks have asked for written notes, which I’ll probably put up here at the blog at some point.

As for when I’m actually going to write about the above topics… well, we’ll see. Hopefully soon.